Thursday, July 5, 2012

Royals Today: 7/5/12.

I feel like I owe you an all-positive post today, to make up
for all the Sanchez-bashing last time around. So here you go.

Salvador Perez

We all missed Perez terribly, while he missed the first half
of the season recovering from a torn meniscus suffered in spring training.
(Perez tore his meniscus lunging for a pitch out of the strike zone. Who threw
that pitch? Jonathan Sanchez, of course.) But I don’t think we realized just
how badly we missed Perez, because I don’t think we appreciated just how good
he might be.

I appreciated how good he was last season; as I’ve written before, he had the highest batting
average by a 21-year-old catcher (min: 100 AB) in major-league history, and the
3rd highest OPS, behind Joe Mauer and Johnny Bench. But even I was concerned
about what his performance meant. Batting average is a highly variable
statistic, particularly in a sample size of just 39 games, and Perez hadn’t hit
at that level at any point in the minor leagues.

His career line in the minors is .287/.329/.397; in Double-A
last season, he hit .283/.329/.427. Those are fine numbers for an elite
defensive catcher who is young for his leagues, but not the performance you’d
project into an All-Star caliber player in the majors. Throw in the injury, and
you had to be concerned that the player we saw on the field in late 2011 was a
bit of a mirage.

That may yet prove to be the case, but we’re getting closer
and it still looks like an oasis. Perez played 12 games in Triple-A on rehab
and hit .340 – a soft .340, with just two walks and two extra-base hits (both
doubles) – but still, .340. He was activated on June 22nd – and homered in his
first game back. He hasn’t stopped hitting since.

Literally. Perez has played in 10 games since his return,
and has a hit in all 10 of them – including one game in which he had a single
pinch-hit at-bat. Perez has a ten-game hitting streak going, which is already the second-longest hitting
streak by a Royal this season. (Eric Hosmer, surprisingly, hit in 11
straight from May 28 to June 9.)

Late update:
Perez is in the lineup for the fourth straight night tonight, and singled in
his first at-bat, starting a five-run inning. So 11 games, 11-game hitting
streak, tied for the longest of the season.

He’s not just hitting, he’s hitting for power. I remarked on
this a little last season, when I was in attendance at US Cellular Field in
September when Perez hit an absolute bomb to right field. It’s rare to see any
player hit a ball that far to the opposite field, let alone a 21-year-old
rookie catcher. He’s shown that kind of power again this year. His second
homer, on June 29, was an opposite-field homer at Target Field. Do you know how
hard it is to hit a home run to the opposite field at Target Field? I don’t
have numbers for this season, but between 2010 and 2011, according to the Bill James Handbook, Target Field
reduced homers by 24%. For left-handed hitters, homers were cut 32%, which
suggests that it’s even harder to hit homers to right field than elsewhere in
that ballpark. (Since the ballpark opened, Joe Mauer has hit 14 homers on the
road – and just three at home.)

On Monday night, Perez showed a different kind of power. He
dropped the bat head on a pitch that was low and inside. Just keeping that ball
fair was impressive enough – but he hit a line drive that somehow carried over
the left field wall. I can’t do it justice with words – watch it here.

In ten games, Perez is hitting .371/.371/.714; for his
career – all of 49 games – he’s hitting .339/.363/.519. There are warts to
Perez’s game, certainly. He hasn’t drawn a walk yet, and he’s bounced into two
double plays. Extrapolate his career to 162 games, and he’d have as many GIDPs
(23) as walks. He’s only thrown out 10 of 44 base stealers (23%) in his career,
although 1) his career rate in the minors was 42% and 2) that doesn’t count the
three guys he’s picked off.

I realize the sample size is vanishingly small here, but my
opinion on Perez isn’t simply based on the numbers, but on – perish the thought
– my eyes. He hits everything HARD. His line-drive rate (and with the caveat
that “line drives” are highly observer-dependent; what some people will call a
line drive other people will call a fly ball) for his career is 27.6%, well
above the league average of 18%. He’s earned his .339 average.

And as crazy as this might sound, if you put a gun to my
head and I had to predict which player in the Royals organization will go to
the most All-Star Games in his career…I’d probably pick Perez. Moustakas,
Hosmer, Gordon, Butler…all those guys play high-offense positions where the
standard for offense is really high. If Perez is simply a .280-.290 hitter with
15-20 homers, he’s going to be one of the best offensive catchers in the league
along with excellent defense. The two best catchers in the AL right now are
probably Joe Mauer and Matt Wieters. (Mike Napoli starts the All-Star Game, but
that’s a homer pick that’s unlikely to be repeated.) Mauer can’t stay healthy
and might move to another position before long; Wieters has the sterling
pedigree but is more of a very good player than a star.

Perez has a lot to prove, starting with whether he can stay
healthy or not. But everything we’ve seen from him since he arrived in Kansas
City says that he’s a budding star. And as for his minor-league track
record…let’s not forget that he was 17 when he started playing. He hit .189 in
A-ball in 2009 – when he was 18. He started 2010 in Wilmington when he was 19 –
he turned 20 a month into the season. Hitting in the Death Valley of the minor
leagues, he batted .290/.322/.437. Last year he hit .290/.331/.437 in the high
minors and was in the majors three months after he turned 21. (If I’ve done the
research correctly, Perez is the ninth-youngest position player ever to suit up
for the Royals.)

While much of the reason why the Royals have been such a
failure the last 15 years is because many of their top prospects have failed to
develop, a contributing factor is that they really haven’t had anyone who wasn’t a top prospect who surprised in a
positive fashion. Think of someone like Andre Ethier, who was a 23-year-old in
Double-A that the A’s thought so little of that they traded him for Milton
Bradley – and then arrived in the majors the following year as an above-average
outfielder who improved until he was an All-Star. Or Robinson Cano, who hit
.278/.331/.425 in the minor leagues and was made available to the Royals for
Carlos Beltran, only Allard Baird decided on Mark Teahen because dadgummit,
they needed a third baseman.

Well, Perez might be that guy. When the Royals placed nine
guys on Baseball America’s Top 100
Prospect List, we knew some of them would fail, but we hoped that those
failures would be compensated for by players who snuck under the radar of that
list. Most people would agree that Perez is one of those players. What is much
more controversial is that Perez might prove to be as valuable as anyone the
Royals had on that list in the first place. It’s way too early to say so with
any confidence. But every time we think Perez has reached his ceiling, he
builds himself another one. I can’t wait to see the perch he finally settles in
at.

In the meantime, I suggest the Royals keep his knees in
bubble wrap. Tall catchers and knee injuries go hand in hand. The Royals can’t
afford another one.

Luis Mendoza

The quick prologue to the Luis Mendoza story: a journeyman
right-hander going nowhere, rebuilt his delivery last season in Triple-A, led
the PCL in ERA despite striking nobody out. We were very skeptical of his
chances. He pitched very well in spring training, including an excellent
strikeout rate, which might have indicated something.

Or not. In his first start, Mendoza walked four and struck
out two, which set the tone. In his next start, he walked four and struck out
one, and also allowed nine runs in four innings. He was bumped from the
rotation after just four starts, but the same pattern continued in the bullpen.
Through the 6th of June, Mendoza had 25 walks and 19 strikeouts, and it’s
essentially impossible to be even remotely successful in the major leagues in
the 21st century when you have more walks than strikeouts. Batters were hitting
.312/.405/.399 against him; he was lucky to have a 5.36 ERA.

But then something funny happened. He went back into the
rotation on June 12th when the dreaded Black Arm Death swept through the
pitching staff. In his first start, he took a no-hitter into the seventh – and
struck out four batters against two walks. In five starts since returning to
the rotation, he has walked no more than two batters in any start. He has
struck out at least four batters in all but one of those starts. Wednesday
night, he struck out a career-high nine.

Here’s Mendoza’s line in his last five starts:

30 IP, 28 H, 6 BB, 25 K, 2 HR, 3.26 ERA.

I have no idea what this means. I have no idea if this is
sustainable. But strikeout and walk rates stabilize as quickly as any stat in
the game, meaning that you don’t need as large of a sample size to trust them. Something happened to Mendoza when he
returned to the rotation. Whether it was something as simple as gaining
confidence in his pitches, or whether it was trying to mix his pitches up more
so that his repertoire wasn’t as predictable the third time through the lineup
(where he was getting killed), I don’t know. Maybe he added a pitch, or subtly
adjusted an old one. I don’t know.

But I want to see more. Given the state of the Royals’
rotation, it’s easy to say “well, he’ll certainly get the opportunity to show
us more,” but it’s actually worse than that. Mendoza has a 4.50 ERA on the
season, which is hardly great, or even good – the American League as a whole
has a 4.04 ERA, and starting pitchers have a 4.37 ERA*, so his performance is
still below-average.

Except that right now, Mendoza has the best ERA of anyone in the Royals’ rotation. Luis Mendoza, for lack
of a better term, is currently the Royals’ ace. He is their stopper. Those
aren’t the saddest words I’ve ever written, but if you’re thinking that the
Royals might actually have a chance to get back in the race this year, I
suggest you read the opening sentence of this paragraph a few dozen more times.

*: AL starting pitchers have a 4.37 ERA, but AL relievers
have a 3.41 ERA. Relievers generally have better ERAs, because they’re more
effective and because of the way
inherited runners are charged to the outgoing pitcher, but the gap isn’t
usually this wide. Just three years ago, for instance, AL starters had a 4.62
ERA, but relievers had a 4.17 ERA. The ERA gap was 45 points in 2009, and 96
points – more than double – in 2012.
So if it seems like every team has a great bullpen…that’s because they do. It
might be just one of those years – or it could be that teams are doing a better
job than ever of identifying potential bullpen arms and deploying them
correctly.

Bubba Starling

Any truth to the
rumors that the Royals are keeping Starling in extended spring training to
shield him from prying eyes that may notice he’s not very good? – May 2nd

You probably know about my growing concerns with Starling,
the hometown kid who was the #5 overall pick in one of the deepest drafts in a
generation last season. You probably remember my study from last year about the
importance of draft age among high school hitters, and the implication that
Starling, who turned 19 before he even signed, was a significant risk to
underperform, particularly compared with #8 overall pick Francisco Lindor, who
was just 17 when he signed.

My concerns only grew when Lindor headed straight to the
Midwest League in April and performed well – he’s hitting .262/.349/.374 as an
18-year-old, and scouting reports are uniformly glowing – while Starling stayed
back in extended spring training. They grew more when it turned out our
expectations that Starling would head to Kane County as soon as the weather
warmed up were unfounded, and that the Royals eventually decided he would be
best served by debuting in the Appalachian League, a couple rungs down the
minor league chain.

Swing remains long.
Wrists very fast. – May 10th

Meanwhile, it felt like every 2011 first-round pick was
crushing it. I’m not just talking about the four guys who went ahead of
Starling, like Gerrit Cole and Danny Hultzen and Trevor Bauer and Dylan Bundy.
I’m talking about Jose Fernandez (#14 pick to the Marlins, now the #8 prospect
in baseball per Baseball America) and
Matt Barnes (#19 to the Red Sox, #13 prospect) and Lindor (#14 prospect) and
Archie Bradley (#7 pick, #16 prospect) and Javier Baez (#9 pick, #25 prospect)
and George Springer (#11 pick, #45 prospect).

And then Starling got hurt, straining his hamstring after
his first at-bat in an exhibition game two days before his season was supposed
to begin. Let’s just say I was becoming less worried and more bitter. I was
starting to wonder whether Starling was just the local version of Roscoe
Crosby. Starling ranks #46 on Baseball
America’s mid-season list – behind ten other guys in the 2011 draft.

Everything’s working
except the bat. – May 19th

Starling finally debuted on June 28, and I knew I would
violently overreact to his first pro game. Naturally, he went 0-for-5 with
three strikeouts (and a walk). Beautiful.

But if I’m allowed to overreact over one game, I can also
overreact over one week. And I will say, a week later, that I’ve lowered the
DEFCON rating a slot on Starling. On Monday, in his fourth game as a pro, he
homered – twice – and singled. On Tuesday, he went 2-for-4. Last night, he went
2-for-4 with a triple and two walks.

Starling’s had a hand
dip in his swing his whole life. Will take time to unlearn and retrain. Easy
thing to spot, don’t know how easy to fix. – June 14th

Through six games, Starling is hitting .360/.484/.680. More
importantly, he’s showing at least a rudimentary understanding of the strike
zone. In six games, he’s struck out seven times – and drawn five walks. Even in
a sample size of just six games, those rates are somewhat meaningful. The #1
pitfall for tools demons who get drafted in the first round is plate
discipline. As an example, Anthony Hewitt was the Phillies’ first-round pick in
2008 despite being very raw at the plate, because he was one of the best
athletes the draft had seen in years. In his first pro season, he struck out 55
times – and walked seven times, for a K/BB ratio of nearly 8 to 1. Incredibly,
it got worse each of the next two years – 77/9 in 2009, 158/13 in 2010. Hewitt
is 23 years old and still in A-ball, his career jeopardized by a simple
inability to tell balls from strikes.

I’d venture to say that there is no point in Hewitt’s career where he drew as
many as five walks during a stretch where he struck out seven times. Simply
ruling out an extreme case of plate indiscipline makes it more likely that
Starling will reach his considerable ceiling as a hitter. It’s certainly not enough
– Donavan Tate, the #3 overall pick in 2009 and a worst-case scenario for
Starling, has had pretty good strikeout-to-walk ratios throughout his career;
he simply hasn’t hit worth a damn.

Bubba Starling’s swing
is transformed. In like a month. Whoever’s been coaching him has worked wonders
with it. He’ll match the hype even if he doesn’t improve his technique any
further. – July 5th

All quotes in italics are from a Baseball Person whose
opinion I trust greatly. If anything, the evolution of his opinions are more
dramatic – and more optimistic – than any amount of statistical evidence that
six games can provide.

I’d still rather have Dylan Bundy. I’d still rather have
Francisco Lindor, frankly. But then we knew on Draft Day that Starling was a
bigger risk than either of them; it’s just that he had an upside that bordered
on historic. It’s still doubtful that he’ll reach it, but I’m feeling a heck of
a lot better about him than I was a month ago, or even a week ago.

Rany, I wrote about Mendoza on my blog. I only looked at his fangraphs page quickly, and only the year to year data; but the big thing that jumped out about him is he has gone to his two seamer as his primary pitch 46% with his four seam fastball at around 26%. Last season he pretty much threw only the 4 seamer (70%). Mendoza gets much more horizontal break on his 2 seamer. He's also shelved his curve and increased the number of sliders he throws.

I'm trying to remember the night, but I had the Royals on TV, wasn't particularly paying attention when I looked up, saw the runner go, and watched Perez grab a pitch low and away, then threw the runner out FROM HIS KNEE! Just to make sure I saw what I thought I saw, I rewinded on the good ole' DVR and watched it about five times. Then I called my dad to see if he was watching the game. When was the last time I did that-- I can't even remember?

Of course, the announcers didn't catch the knee throw until after the break, what can you expect from them? But signing Perez, and the players we have up and coming is why I am hopeful for the future.

Rany - through your tweet, I found the article which quoted your baseball prospectus blogs and read your articles on the four-man rotation. Perhaps you could a piece on how the Royals could use a four man rotation this year (anything to cut Sanchez out) as well as how it would project to 2013 and 2014 as the Royals' pitching prospects develop.

I think if you decide as an organization to go to a four man rotation, you almost have to start in the minor leagues first. Especially a team like the Royals, who's best pitchers are still in the minors. Get these kids used to pitching every 4th day so that when they get to the big leagues its nothing new to them and they know how to handle it.

I'm not at all anti-Garza...and he'd be an improvement. But he's having the worst season of his career. And he's going to be one year away from free agency. I'm not sure how much I'd give up for him, but it'd be no where near what the Cubs gave up for him. Maybe a B prospect and maybe a C..?

Nice to see the article on Grantland. After two (maybe three?) straight years of doing nothing but praising the job Dayton Moore has done it was suprising to see you finally start to expect some results. GMDM really seems to be failing at either getting pitching through the draft or through free agency. HOw suprising is that considering the organization he comes from and how good they are at turning pitching prospects into major league pitchers? Any analysis into the minor league pitching system of the Royals and how it differs from an organization that is good turning prospects into producers ? I know every organization has their stories but Kansas City has too many to be coincedence (sp?). Colt Griffin anyone ?

Kenneth-I agree. It's crazy how bad the Royals have been at producing their own starting pitching. Greinke is the only one in the past decade that we have drafted that turned into anything even decent. Even the hyped prospects we have now are fizzling out. Montgomery, Dwyer, Melville, etc. I am curious to see how John Lamb develops once he comes back. He was always my favorite of the pitching prospects and so far, hasn't fizzled out production-wise. Maybe it's because we haven't used our top draft picks on pitchers recently (until Zimmer, of course), maybe its because we suck at evaluating amateur pitching talent, or maybe it's because we suck at developing that talent. Somewhere along the line though, we obviously are dropping the ball.